This. Is. CONSERVATISM!

It’s getting awfully gossipy up there in the highest governmental institutions. Boebert and Greene are fighting.

It’s no secret that the relationship between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert has never been worse. They’ve yelled at each other on and off the floor. Greene recently called Boebert a “little bitch” to her face. And Boebert supported Greene’s removal from the Freedom Caucus.

But, lawmakers told The Daily Beast, the situation between the two is still even worse than most people think.

“A fistfight could break out at any moment,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told The Daily Beast.

Can we get some hair-pulling, too? Screeching and clawing with long nails? Is this an episode of Housewives of Washington DC or what?

Another Republican lawmaker who is close to both Greene and Boebert told The Daily Beast that the situation was a tinderbox.

“You can’t have too many of these rifts for too long,” this lawmaker said.

Another GOP member suggested that one of them would destroy the other—they just didn’t know who would come out on top.

“They will be nailing that coffin shut,” this lawmaker said, “and one of them is still in there kicking and screaming!”

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) compared Greene and Boebert’s battle to that of a “two-way sword.”

“I just think that whatever is there, could be utilized both ways,” he said, adding that “people make decisions that they have to work and live by, and you kind of hate being in their shoes.”

After Greene called Boebert a “little bitch” to her face on the House floor, Greene was summarily booted from the House Freedom Caucus. And while Boebert could have probably helped save Greene from that embarrassment by defending her to the group, she instead chose to agree with fellow Freedom Caucus members, voting for Greene’s dismissal.

The “Freedom” Caucus was already a joke, with some of the worst people in congress gathering together to pressure everyone else to bow to their terrible politics, but this just makes it simultaneously worse and more laughable.

While the HFC was founded on not allowing showier, less serious conservative voices to join its ranks—like Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA)—that thinking has been a thing of the past for years. The Freedom Caucus eventually even let Gohmert join its ranks. (Both members are now gone from Congress.)

By the time Greene and Boebert arrived in Congress just days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Freedom Caucus was allowing almost any rambunctious conservative to join. It had, after all, primarily become a pro-Donald Trump group and less of the ideological organization formed to fight for a more open process in Congress.

And now it’s a forum for petty high school drama. I hope this makes it less effective.

Remember when Congress was all about dignity and decorum? Nah, I don’t either.

How to make the medical establishment very angry

Just publish the truth about their history.

During the mid-nineteenth century, medical schools embraced a white supremacist belief in black inferiority and subhumanness. Racism was a social sport upper-class men played to solidify a professional identity rooted in whiteness (figure 1). These heinous ‘educational’ activities included torturing enslaved black people with ‘experiments’, graverobbing their bodies from cemeteries and attempting to detect whether they were faking illness while torturing them as ‘treatment’ (Willoughby 2016). This white supremacy persisted long after legalised slavery ended. The 1910 Flexner Report closed five of the seven black medical schools, preventing 35 000 black physicians from graduating in subsequent decades, amidst deadly black–white health inequities (Campbell et al. 2020). The American Medical Association (AMA) sanctioned this disregard for humanity, banning black physicians from local AMA chapters through the 1960s, thereby denying licensing, board certification and hospital privileges (Baker et al. 2008). This anti-black racism was nothing new. During the early twentieth century, organised medicine cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the Ku Klux Klan, promoting its white supremacist conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality and their related violence (Antonovich 2021). White psychiatrists diagnosed black men protesting during the Civil Rights movement with a dangerous ‘protest psychosis’. Pathologising black people’s resistance to oppression while normalising white people’s violently oppressive behaviour is a long historical arc. It is reflected in diagnoses like drapetomania from the mid-nineteenth century and the overdiagnosis of conduct disorder in racially minoritised children today (Metzl 2010).

That photo is genuinely horrible and shameful. The account is true, every word, and damning. Yet the article that was from triggered outrage from medical institutions. It shouldn’t. I like this comment from Dr Brandy Schillace, about how they should respond:

That’s how we build. That’s how we have real conversation and community. There is amazing relief, Grace, growth, in admitting we are wrong AND acknowledging that the wrong has deeply hurt others. Then both apology and amendment will be genuine, and accepted as such.

Ken Ham is a disingenuous fraud on climate change

I’m sorry, I feel stupider for having read this: it’s Ken Ham talking about climate change. He reports the headlines:

Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend here in the US, headlines proclaimed: “For the third day in a row, Earth’s average temperature breaks record highs.” Last week on July 5, 2023, the average global temperature (according to one university’s “Climate Reanalyzer,” “a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition”) was a record 62.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 17.18 C), beating the “record” set on Monday. But is this really a record?

Yes.

But Ol’ Ken questions it.

…was last week really a record? Well, it might have been—but we don’t really know! Humans have only been recording climate data since the 1880s, and we’ve only had robust data since satellite data collection began in the 1970s. So we have no idea how warm the warmest day on earth was in all of the earth’s history! (But we do know, based on the fossil record, that the earth’s climate was much warmer before the flood!)

You idiot. We have over a century of robust climate records, and this was the highest temperature on record, therefore, yes, it was a record high temperature. Words mean things, you know. They weren’t saying this was the hottest the planet had ever been — that probably occurred about 4½ billion years ago, when the planet was a molten ball of rock — but the hottest since we humans have been carefully tracking the climate. OK, you fucking stupid charlatan?

But he goes on to top that disingenuous word game. He claims that he believes in climate change.

Not only do I believe in climate change, but I’m a climate change alarmist, and I do believe humans have caused climate change!

Except…just not the way scientists do, with their measurements and data and records. No, he believes in a coming Biblical catastrophe.

Well, I’m not referring to a supposed slight global temperature increase allegedly caused by humans burning fossil fuels. I’m referring to the ultimate catastrophic climate change everyone should be aware of when one day in the future, Jesus will return, and the earth (and the whole universe) will be judged with fire, and God will make a new heavens and earth.

He then goes on to say that humans are the cause of this coming catastrophic climate change, because of our sin in Adam…except he then goes on to say that we’re not going to be the cause.

So, man is not going to destroy the earth! We can boldly proclaim that humans aren’t going to destroy themselves or the earth because God is in complete control, and he will determine when the ultimate catastrophic climate change will occur. So, the climate change countdown clock is absurd! We need to understand and believe in climate alarmism in a biblical context.

This is a bait-and-switch game AiG plays all the time. They have multiple articles with titles like Science Confirms Climate Change and The Globe Is Warming, But It’s Not Your Fault! and I’m a Climate Change Alarmist! that, when you actually read them, are denying all the scientific evidence in order to claim that the basis of their belief rests entirely on Bible prophecy, and that, of course, the way to prepare for climate change is to pray and go to church and give Answers in Genesis your money. The only reason you should worry about environmental catastrophe is if you don’t fear God.

Lord, I despise these liars.

Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1: A surfeit of colons

I saw this dog’s breakfast of a movie last night. Hated it.

  • It’s got a macguffin, a cruciform key that somehow will give the person who uses it control of an AI that can crack all of the intelligence agencies in the world. It does nothing in this movie. It’s just a small metal object that everyone has to chase, endlessly.

  • It has the most boring villain ever. A handsome man named Gabriel who, apparently at the behest of the AI, appears to stand handsomely in the middle of the action, doing pretty much nothing, except it turns out he’s a great knife-fighter in one scene.

  • There are car chases. They’re pointless exercises in chasing — they’re only motivated by the fact that someone has the macguffin, and someone else wants it. You want car chases? Go watch Baby Driver, which does them well and integrates them into the story.

  • There is a fight scene on top of a runaway train. Of course there is.

  • Ving Rhames is the stereotypical movie hacker. He doesn’t do anything but make portentous statements and announce that he’s going to hack a computer. He wiggles his fingers magically. Don’t worry, no one involved in writing this movie understands computers or hacking or AI.

  • Oh my god, the writing. It’s terrible. For instance, there’s a scene where a room full of intelligence bureaucrats who are reciting a summary of the problem. The thing is, it’s a series of sentences, and the individuals go around the room with each one saying one sentence in turn. People don’t talk that way. There are multiple scenes where the dialog is clumsy and unrealistic.

  • There is a stupid scene where Simon Pegg is sent on a side-quest to neutralize a tiny nuclear bomb. It turns out to be a puzzle game, with riddles. It’s like something you’d find in a video game. And then it turns out to be a fake bomb. The whole scene could have been cut without affecting the movie at all, except that they needed to give Pegg something to do.

  • The masks. I hate the fucking stupid masks, and the obligatory scene where a character pulls off a thick rubbery latex mask to reveal that he was some other character. Masks can’t do that, they’ll fool no one, but it’s a thing in these movies.

  • Tom Cruise, running. Running, running, running. He never arrives at a fight out of breath, though.

  • There are stunts done for the sake of being stunts. The stupid mask machine burnt out, so Tom Cruise can’t just disguise himself and walk onto a train, he instead chooses to jump off a mountain in a motorcycle and parachute into the moving train. Yeah, much more subtle and sneaky. No one will notice.

  • It is two hours and forty three minutes long, and it’s just part one.

  • In the next movie, they already have the macguffin part one, so macguffin part two will be a sunken submarine beneath the arctic ice cap, where the AI exists. I don’t care.

The best thing about Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 is that it cured me of any desire to see Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2. Too late. It’s going to make a derailed train car falling off a cliff full of money.

The George Floyd murder only exposed a deeper rot in Minnesota

The Minneapolis Police Department has received some, shall we say, rather negative press for a series of ugly incidents — not just the George Floyd murder, but also other outrages. So the United States Department of Justice carried out an investigation. The results have been released in a 92 page document. It’s not pretty. Here is the summary of the major conclusions.

FINDINGS
The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law:

  • MPD uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force and other types of force.
  • MPD unlawfully discriminates against Black and Native American people in its enforcement activities.
  • MPD violates the rights of people engaged in protected speech.
  • MPD and the City discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls for assistance.

We like to think that Minnesota is a pretty good place to live — good schools, progressive politics, relatively good cost of living, etc., etc., etc. — but that only applies if you’re white. The report also documents some of our deeper problems.

Not everyone in Minneapolis shares in its prosperity. The metropolitan area that includes Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul—known as the Twin Cities—has some of the nation’s starkest racial disparities on economic measures, including income, homeownership, poverty, unemployment, and educational attainment. By nearly all of these measures, the typical white family in the Twin Cities is doing better than the national average for white families, and the typical Black family in the Twin Cities is doing worse than the national average or Black families. The median Black family in the Twin Cities earns just 44% as much as the median white family, and the poverty rate among Black households is nearly five times higher than the rate among white households. Of the United States’ 100 largest metropolitan areas, only one has a larger gap between Black and white earnings.

In case you’re wondering how we ended up this way…

Some researchers have traced Minneapolis’ homeownership gap and other economic disparities back to the restrictive racial covenants that barred non-white people from living in many parts of Minneapolis in the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in 1910, local and federal public officials and mortgage lenders embraced racial covenants, and lenders engaged in redlining by routinely denying loans for properties in majority Black or mixed-race neighborhoods. The racially restrictive covenants, which the Supreme Court sanctioned in 1926 but later ruled unenforceable in 1948, funneled the City’s growing Black population into a few small areas and laid the groundwork for enduring patterns of residential segregation.

It’s as if there is an effect of history that is harming current generations, and a deep institutional racism routinely propped up by the courts.

The Muslim fly studies are back!

Stop me if you’ve heard this before…oh wait. If you’ve read this blog before you’ve encountered this phenomenon in the past. There is a strange cottage industry among Muslim fanatics to demonstrate the infallibility of Mohammed by testing one of his weirder claims. This one:

Over a thousand years ago Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) said “if a fly falls down on your vessel, drown it then remove it, for one of its wings has the ailment and other has the cure” narrated by Al-Bokhari. In this study 4 flies of (Musca domestica) species were collected to investigate the antibacterial and antifungal activity of their wings. The obtained result showed that all media cultivated with right wing extract were free of bacterial and fungal growth however the bacterial and fungal growth for the left wing were observed. It could be concluded that the right fly wing is considered as new revolution of antibiotic recommended for further researches to find more antibiotics from right fly wing.

That’s from an article with the ungrammatical title, Microbiological Studies on Fly Wings(Musca domestica) Where Disease and Treat. I guess the World Journal of Medical Sciences does not exercise any editorial oversight at all, and their review process is a bit of a joke. The paper itself is incredibly bad, of a quality that would earn a failing grade if it were presented as a middle school science fair project. I mean, seriously — here’s the entirety of the results section (with a bit of the introduction and methods).

Pic. (1), (2) and (3) illustrated that there were no bacterial or fungal growth in test tubes containing the right fly wing extract however there were microbial growth in 4 test tubes for left wings extract indicated by turbidity which had been confirmed by microscopical examination, the slides for the right wings extract were free for the presence of any microbe although the slides for the left ones showed presence of both bacteria (cocci and bacilli) and fungi (hyphea)

That’s it. That’s all. Do you believe any of it? It’s not just the lack of believable data, but the introduction is full of obvious nonsense.

Entomologist latest research, certify that there is very little difference between a human and a fly-heart where biggest similarity is that both have heart disease as a result of getting older. Studied flies in order to produce cardiac medications

I know what both a fly heart and a human heart look like — and no, the only similarity is in some of the molecules that initiate differentiation.

I guess the only thing we can learn here is that the World Journal of Medical Sciences is not a trustworthy source. It’s a dumping ground for bad science and is nothing but a tool for incompetent pseudoscientists to pad their résumé.

People actually think that way

I know I tend to get peevish about bad biology and reductionism and equating human beings with their gametes, but it’s a real problem.

The debate about Margot Robbie being mid or hot, whatever — ignores her important eugenic quality — she has a powerful jawline. She was designed to birth Jocks. Women have aesthetic purpose, but their main purpose is to birth the next generation.

Oh sure, she’s pretty, but her main reason for existence is to have babies, and Rægenhere can tell from her physiognomy what kind of children she’ll have. Riiight. So many things wrong with that claim.

These people actually exist.